Wine tour and the Beach

After a week of quite cold weather in Patagonia, it was quite nice to be back in warm and sunny Santiago. It was not a long, stay just 15 hours, but still. I stayed in the same hotel that I had done when I arrived to Chile. It is a nice middle class hotel called Bonaparte. The rooms are nice and clean, the internet quite reliable and the breakfast great. All that you need from a hotel room. I spent the evening catching up on e-mails, Facebook and wrote a couple of blog posts.

The next day was the wine tour day. At 9 my ride came to pick me up. The wine tour was supposed to start at 10.20. First I thought it was a bit early to drink wine, but I got into wine mood as soon as I arrived at the vineyard. It is called Concha y Toro and is, according to our guide, the second largest winery in the world. In Sweden I think the most known wine from them is Casillero Del Diablo. It turns out that the winery has a quite wide selection of different wines and as a part of the tour we got to try some of them. I fell in love with the Private Selection of the Casillero. So I bought a bottle of that, together with a bottle of Rosé and a bottle of sparkling. No - I don't plan to bring it back to Sweden, but to drink in on my days at the beach together with my friend Maria. During the wine tour we also got to meet the devil in the cellar. :-)

The Vineyards

The Devil in the Cellar

After that my driver took me to the beach. It was a 2,5 hours drive from the winery, where I slept most of the drive. I finally arrived at Hermansens Cabins in Maitencillo. The cabins where next to the biggest beach so it was a great location, but "my" cabin wasn't the best one. It is situated just behind the main building, so you can only see a glimpse of the ocean through the windows. But it has a nice outdoor place with a BBQ place. The cabin itself is quite small. Then it turned out that they had cleaned the cabin with some kind of stuff that consists of gasoline. It smelled so much, so I could hardly breath inside. I actually first thought it was a gas leak in the house, but it turned out that the smell went away when the cleaned the cabin a second time with some other stuff. I was not in a good mood through all this. After a very late lunch, that they offered me for free due to the smell issue, I decided to write some blog posts. Then the internet didn't work. Sigh! Well you should have days with issues also on your vacation. The next day the internet worked, even though it is not totally reliable. And the beach is great. So now I think I can enjoy my days in Maitencillo. ;-)

The beach in Maitencillo

The front yard of the cabin